


Temporary Safety

by livenudebigfoot



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, M/M, who can say really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-29
Updated: 2016-06-29
Packaged: 2018-07-18 22:27:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7333171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/livenudebigfoot/pseuds/livenudebigfoot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He finds out another way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Temporary Safety

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Dien](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dien/gifts).



> Dien requested Finch/Fusco hospital visit cuteness and Finch telling Fusco about the Machine on his own initiative, so that's what I tried to achieve. Happy birthday, u bum <3.

The hospital is different at night, quieter. It's eerie, but also familiar, the way anything becomes if you do it enough.

Lionel's spent his share of nights in hospitals. The first time, when his wife went into that long, long labor and he wore a fucking hole in the tile waiting. He thought maybe when Lee came he could sleep, but that was a rookie mistake and Lionel was up til daybreak, watching him and holding him and taking Lee's tiny fist between two fingers like he couldn't believe how small.

The last time, just a month ago. 'Cause he'd hit his head in that car accident. 'Cause he hits his head a lot lately, and after a certain point, you gotta go sit in a quiet room for 8 hours while people with clipboards watch you very closely to make sure your brain doesn't turn to scrambled egg.

He tries his best to get out of that, but he doesn't always.

He arches his back in bed, digs his head back into the pillow, stares into the blank, white ceiling. He's supposed to be sleeping. If a doctor or a nurse or anybody were in here, they'd say "You should be sleeping" and he'd just want to spit in their eye. But he's already done a bunch of sleeping and his rhythms are all fucked up and what he'd like, what he'd really like, is to get the fuck out of here. 

Hell, he's never tried it, Maybe he can get discharged now, while things are quiet. While Reese isn't haunting the space outside his door. Lionel doesn't think he can take another 8 hours of Reese anxiously staring him down through the tiny window in his door, wearing a new hole in the tile with his pacing. He definitely can't stand to walk out past him.

He's quitting this, Reese and Finch and the rest, because he has to. Wanting is another thing.

Maybe he can flag down a nurse or something, sneak right out before Reese has a chance to make eyes at him again.

He rolls out of bed, groans when his hip cracks like _oh fuck, he is crippled_ , and hobbles his way to the door.

_Look at you, Lionel. Fit as a fiddle._

He leans maybe a little too heavily on the door as he peers into the hallway, dimmed down and oily with fluorescence. 

To the left of his door, folded neatly into a plastic chair, is Finch. Head dropped back against the wall, open book on his knee, glasses slipping down his nose, snoring gently: Finch.

Lionel's first thought is that he just looks very small asleep. Just a little, gray, rumpled man who's no trouble to anybody. God, Lionel wants to yell at him. Wants to shake him, almost, except that's a more serious thing when it comes to Finch. Wants to ask him why.

The book in Finch's lap is sliding off his knees, degree by degree.

He rests a hand on Finch's tweedy shoulder and jostles him, gently as he can, until the book drops off Finch's lap and thwaps onto the linoleum floor. Finch starts, blinks up at him blearily and fondly over his glasses.

Suddenly, all Lionel can think about is how his hospital gown is backless, how he shouldn't have walked into this. He asks, "You been here long?"

Finch nods, rubbing his eyes. "On and off." He bends to retrieve his book from the floor. "We were all here this morning, of course. Miss Groves had work to do and I did as well, so we left Mr. Reese here and he and I been trading off ever since."

Lionel's lip curls. "What're you, standing guard?"

"If need be," Finch says, quite seriously. His hands flutter and fall clasped, forcefully still, on his knee. "How are you, Detective?"

"Tunnel collapsed on me," he says, "but other than that, OK."

"We _are_ sorry about that," Finch acknowledges, sounding suitably abashed. "It was meant to be Miss Groves in that tunnel, not you."

"Dunno if that's any better. Skinny thing like her, I don't know if I like her chances under a ton of rocks."

"Miss Groves was better equipped to deal with the risks."

"Oh, yeah? How?"

Finch falls uneasily silent, lips pursed. "I _am_ trying to apologize, Detective."

"Not good enough." It isn't. He sees from Finch's eyes, how they're sad, that it won't be.

"Seems to be the theme." He clears his throat delicately, stares across the hall at nothing in particular, and resettles himself for a few seconds. Finally, he pats the chair beside him. "Won't you?"

Lionel thinks maybe the thing to do is to turn right around and go back to his room, slam the door in Finch's face. But Finch seems in a talking mood and that's such a rare thing. He used to set his watch by those moments, bend over backwards just to keep Finch talking a little longer. Just to keep his clever mind, his clever, buggy eyes focused on Fusco a little longer. This could be the last time. So he sits bare-assed beside Finch and he waits.

"You don't _need_ to know," Finch begins.

"Oh, fuck you."

"You don't. You've been perfectly functional-"

"Does buried in a collapsed tunnel sound functional to you?"

" _Perfectly functional_ ," Finch repeats firmly, "without any foreknowledge whatsoever. You're good at what you do, and what you do does not require-"

"Go to hell," Lionel tells him, softly.

Finch falls quiet, face all dark with hurt. For a moment, Lionel feels guilty. Just a moment. He watches Finch's face, Finch's struggling mouth, until he finally says while staring at his knees, "We're trying to keep you safe. I know it doesn't seem that way, but you don't know what you've been spared."

"I'm not safe," Lionel tells him. "I get that you tried, but I'm not."

"But you could be."

"How? If I quit my job? Took up knitting? Never left the house again?"

"You might forget the missing persons," Finch says tensely. "You might just work in your capacity as a homicide detective. As intended."

"I dunno how to break it to you, Glasses, but those people aren't missing 'cause they ran away to join the circus."

"I know. I know, but it would make you safe."

Lionel shakes his head. "Even if it did - and it wouldn't - what makes me so special? Those people aren't safe, they're getting killed and disappeared and left in fucking tunnels to rot. When that happens to somebody, it's my job to figure out what happened to them. Set things right, best I can. What the hell business do I have being _safe_?"

He turns and finds Finch studying him very carefully. He looks completely miserable. "Detective," he murmurs. "I fear we may have done too well with you."

For a second he wants to apologize. He's not sure for what. Finch covers his white brow with one careful hand and he looks so horribly sad at everything.

"It's not that I'm not pleased at how principled you've become. I've watched you become a very...an admirable man. I can't lay claim to pride, because I'm certain I had little to do with it. But I am proud. I am. You've grown kind." He sets teeth light around his thumbnail and worries at it, gently. "I want to leave you an out. You're a good man, and you're the only one of us who never chose this."

"But I have chosen it."

"But you have," Finch repeats, very carefully. He chews on that a moment, soft-eyed and distressed. "I wish this had never happened," Finch says, softly. "I wish you had accepted my invitation that day instead." 

"Oh, yeah." Lionel remembers it a little. Finch on the phone with some offer. Food, a party, something. Lionel was feeling raw and Finch's weak fumbling at his good will made him sick. "What was it?"

"A wedding," Finch says. "The wedding of a stranger."

"Huh."

"We handled it easily enough," Finch continues, "but there was a good deal of...interpersonal work. Covers and off-the-cuff excuses. Navigating difficult social situations. I had to pretend to be the groom's uncle for a time. It seemed more your area of expertise." He sighs. "At the very least, I might not have been prevailed upon to sing."

Lionel snorts, cracks a small smile. _He's showing you weakness_ , Lionel reminds himself. _Putting himself down a little so you'll like him again._ It's a move Lionel's made many times himself and he knows it well. Finch is clumsy at it, unfamiliar.

But fuck, it's a funny picture. Finch trying to sing at a wedding.

"I suppose more than anything, I just think you might have had a nice time. And I sensed that we might be losing you." Finch hesitates, rubs his hands together slowly. "We _are_ losing you." Finch looks up at him. His eyes are that piercing, too-pale blue and Lionel feels affixed to the chair by it. "Aren't we?"

"Depends on what you mean by that."

Finch blinks at him, refusing to play. 

"Yeah," he admits, and he feels this strange, rollercoaster, panicky high. Relief. Fear. Instant regret. _They are losing him_. "I can't do it anymore, man. Not like this. I wanna keep saving people, but I'm not gonna work in the dark to do it. I'm not gonna take orders and not know where they're coming from or why, 'cause I did that for years and it made me the worst person I've ever been. And I don't care why you're lying to me about what this is. I don't care if you're keeping me safe or if you don't trust me -"

Finch repeats "Trust" breathlessly, almost spits it. His eyes are round and distressed and nearly furious, and Fusco talks right past him.

"- or what the hell ever," he says. "I'm just sick of being lied to. I'll help people on my own time, if I need to."

Finch says, "I do trust you."

Fusco says, "I don't care," but feels a strange, slightly painful warmth in his chest at the thought of it.

Finch looks away from him, eyes on the ceiling. "You're resolved then?"

"Yeah."

"You won't be dissuaded?"

Lionel follows Finch's gaze. He's focused on a teeny beige security camera, mounted in the corner at the end of the hallway. Watching them right back, he bets. "You haven't dissuaded me so far."

Finch sighs very deeply, stashes his book away in the pocket of his coat. "Very well, then. I'd like you to meet me."

Fusco blinks at him. "Are we not..."

"Twenty minutes," he says. "On the roof. I recommend pants, and a jacket if you can find one. Please be discreet. If you are followed, the meeting is off. Understood?"

"I was gonna check out," Fusco says. "Go home."

"You may do what you like," Finch says, voice clipped. "But I will be on the roof in twenty minutes."

And he stands, adjusts his collar and his coat like he's just finished a business meeting, and he leaves Lionel there in the hallway, bare-assed in his papery hospital gown, thinking things over. He stays that way a while, chin in his hands, thinking about Finch and thinking about pride. Thinking, for a weird second, about a wedding he was supposed to be at, where he was supposed to be the groom's uncle's plus one.

Well, he'll need his clothes back either way. 

It's an easy enough thing. One of the guys from the precinct brought him clothes from home - jeans and a t-shirt and a jacket - so he won't have to schlep home in his ripped-up suit. He's comfortable, finally, secure. He slips quiet through the hall, because Finch told him he wasn't to be followed, because he doesn't want to be told to go back to bed before he has a chance to get checked out.

When it comes time to choose, he takes the stairs over the elevator. Elevator won't have roof access. That was inevitable, really.

The door to the roof is already unlocked for him, just waiting. Finch, hands buried deep in his pockets, spiky hair whipping around in the breeze, is waiting too. For an instant he looks regretful, as if he hoped Fusco wouldn't come.

"Knowing this," Finch says to him, "may kill you."

"I know that," Fusco says. "I'm ready for that."

Finch shakes his head at him, wide-eyed. He holds out one hand. "Did you bring your phone?"

Lionel passes it to him and delicately, Finch dismantles it: battery and SIM card all separated and slipped into his pocket. "Now we can speak without being overheard," he says, breezily, as though his fingers aren't shaking.

Lionel moves a little closer to him, shielding him from the wind a little. So he can hear better, he tells himself.

Finch says, "I suppose the fact that you're here means you deserve to know." He attempts a small smile, it trembles, falters. "As dangerous as this is, I suppose you've deserved to know for quite some time."

And Finch takes him by the lapel of his jacket, leans in close to Lionel's ear so the wind won't carry his words away. And he tells him.

As he speaks, he takes Lionel's hand very tightly in his own and Lionel, his head abuzz, grips back.


End file.
